We consider the synthesis of intermediate views of an object captured by two widely spaced and calibrated cameras. This problem is challenging because foreshortening effects and occlusions induce significant differences between the reference images when the cameras are far apart. That makes the association or disappearance/appearance of their pixels difficult to estimate. Our main contribution lies in disambiguating this ill-posed problem by making the interpolated views consistent with a plausible transformation of the object silhouette between the reference views. This plausible transformation is derived from an object-specific prior that consists of a nonlinear shape manifold learned from multiple previous observations of this object by the two reference cameras. The prior is used to estimate the evolution of the epipolar silhouette segments between the reference views. This information directly supports the definition of epipolar silhouette segments in the intermediate views, as well as the synthesis of textures in those segments. It permits to reconstruct the epipolar plane images (EPIs) and the continuum of views associated with the EPI volume, obtained by aggregating the EPIs. Experiments on synthetic and natural images show that our method preserves the object topology in intermediate views and deals effectively with the self-occluded regions and the severe foreshortening effect associated with wide-baseline camera configurations.

This paper approximates the 3D geometry of a scene by a small number of 3D planes. The method is especially suited to man-made scenes, and only requires two calibrated wide-baseline views as inputs. It relies on the computation of a dense but noisy 3D point cloud, as for example obtained by matching DAISY descriptors [35] between the views. It then segments one of the two reference images, and adopts a multi-model fitting process to assign a 3D plane to each region, when the region is not detected as occluded. A pool of 3D plane hypotheses is first derived from the 3D point cloud, to include planes that reasonably approximate the part of the 3D point cloud observed from each reference view between randomly selected triplets of 3D points. The hypothesis-to-region assignment problem is then formulated as an energy-minimization problem, which simultaneously optimizes an original data-fidelity term, the assignment smoothness over neighboring regions, and the number of assigned planar proxies. The synthesis of intermediate viewpoints demonstrates the effectiveness of our 3D reconstruction, and thereby the relevance of our proposed data fidelity-metric.